I was born with a reading list i will never finish – Maud Casey

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At Risk by Stella Rimington

For MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle the nagging complications of her private life are quickly forgotten at Monday’s Counter-Terrorist meeting. An invisible may have entered mainland Britain.

An ‘invisible’ – a terrorist who is an ethnic native of the target country, who can cross its borders unchecked and move about unnoticed – is the ultimate nightmare.

For Liz this signals the start of an operation that will test her to the limit. Who or what is the target? Where and who is the invisible? With each passing hour the danger increases. But as she desperately sifts the incoming intelligence and analyses the reports from her agents she finally realises that it is her ability to get inside her enemy’s head that is the only hope of averting disaster.

At Risk is about Liz, an MI5 Agent Runner who becomes involved in the investigation of a shooting in country England and feels it has a connection to the “invisible” MI6 thinks has crossed into the UK. However will Liz be able to connect all the dots in time to prevent a terrorist attack?

The story started off quite slowly and took awhile to really get going. It didn’t start to get super interesting until probably half way through. I think the slow build up of character development and background information was essential however a little bit of it could have been cut out. There were just some parts that just seemed to be irrelevant, especially looking back when you are able to see the picture as a whole. Overall the slow buildup was clever, like a jigsaw puzzle coming together. At first you have just a bunch of random clues and information however slowly they start to link together to create a bigger picture.

I liked Liz. She was strong, independent and smart. However also friendly and down to earth.

I really, really liked that there was no romance theme throughout the story. Sure, there were moments of sexual tension between characters however they were few and far between. It was refreshing to read a crime fiction novel without any of that angle in it.

I did find it a little confusing at the beginning when it switched between characters because there were so many in the book. I kept losing track of who was who. Eventually I found my way however I did reference back quite a bit to earlier chapters to get my bearings so to speak. Like I mentioned above, you definitely can’t rush the beginning of this book as there is a lot of background information to take in.

Overall I enjoyed the book and I would definitely recommend it those who like crime fiction however not so much if you like it super fast paced. This was slower however had a lot more meat to it so you are more rewarded at the end.